


Six of Cups

by coyotesuspect



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 11:58:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4136631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coyotesuspect/pseuds/coyotesuspect
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Calla's cousin needs a favor. Blue tags along to help. Set pre-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Six of Cups

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tigrrmilk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/gifts).



Someday, DC is gonna sink back into the swamp it was built on. And Calla won’t miss it one bit. The mosquitoes can have it, she thinks bitterly as she sways with the Metro’s curves.  
  
Blue, however, sucks in her breath gleefully and clings to Calla’s leg.

“It’s like we’re on a _dragon_!” she squeals.

“Uh huh,” says Calla. She steadies herself against the pole, closing her eyes as dozens of pieces of lives fracture through her head. She’s wearing gloves, but on items that have been touched a lot, that’s not always a help. Boredom, boredom, someone anxious for the train to go faster, worried they’ll be late for a meeting, lust – vivid image of a young woman in heels and a pencil skirt (Calla sneers), anger, career jealousy, exhaustion. She’s already feeling nauseous and tense from the bus ride up from Henrietta. Getting a hundredfold dose of the public transit experience isn’t helping.

Blue reaches for Calla’s free hand.

“Not now,” says Calla, harsher than she means to. She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose.  
  
Blue huffs and goes back to clinging to Calla’s leg. She’s watching everything big-eyed and fascinated, her first time out of Henrietta, really. And even Calla has to admit it was sweet of Maura to allow Blue to come along on something that’s very much Calla’s own errand.  
  
A couple gets off at the next stop and Calla swoops down on the empty seats, dragging Blue in her wake. She tries to ignore that the man sitting here last was experiencing a strong case of indigestion.  
  
When they get off and back out into fresh(ish) air, Calla practices tai chi. She’s been taking a class. One of the benefits of Henrietta's upper-crust of well-to-do hippies is that its spiritual and physical health offerings are outsized in proportion to the town's population. The tai-chi's a little slow for her tastes. But it helps. She feels a little less like too much loose change stuffed into a ripping bag.

Her cousin's house is a half-mile from the Metro station. Blue practically skips the whole way.  
  
“What’s your cousin like?” she demands, twirling to face Calla and then hopping backwards on one foot.  
  
“He’s tall,” says Calla. “He used to babysit me when I was your age.”  
  
Blue looks highly skeptical of this, as if she doubts Calla had ever been Blue’s age and had not just sprouted fully formed from the earth.  
  
Calla ignores the look. She, truth be told, is not actually sure what her cousin is like any more. For all they were raised together, she hasn’t been back to DC in years and he’s only come once to Henrietta to visit her. It wasn’t a shock when she picked up the phone last evening and heard his voice, but only because her tarot readings all that week indicated her past was going to soon come galloping back into her life.  
  
There’s no animosity, she reflects, watching Blue leap ahead, just the dull ache of years creating a growing separation as each of them walked their own paths. It's only in the looking back you can see how wide the gulf has grown.

Tony’s house is neat and white, part of a duplex, with a waist-high chainlink fence and a sod-covered yard. It’s modest, but respectable. She remembers Nana’s house, which had been modest but never respectable. It had been painted red, the front lawn decorated with strings of “try a free trial of AOL” CD-ROMs they’d get in mail. The CDs would catch the light and shatter it, iridescent and winking. Tony, seven years older than Calla, had hated it. But Calla had loved it, at least for a time.  
  
When Calla crosses the yard and places her hand on Tony’s door, the impressions she gets are safe and domestic – kids running late for the bus, a quick kiss on the lips between Tony and his wife on the doorsteps, bustling everyone out for church on Sunday mornings, a Christmas tree almost too wide to fit through, getting its needles sheared off as it’s shoved inside.  
  
Blue stands on her tiptoes and rings the doorbell.  
  
Tony answers almost immediately, expression bright with hope.  
  
“Calla,” he says, and the hopeful look immediately sags off his face. Though it’s replaced, at least, with a flicker of fondness. Calla doesn’t take it personally. She knows he was hoping it was his daughter at the door. “I didn’t realize you’d be here so quickly.”  
  
“We took the first bus this morning,” says Calla. She examines him with a critical eye. He’s still tall, but his linebacker build’s gone soft around the middle. He doesn’t look to have shaved in a couple days. He looks like a grown adult, and no longer a scared little boy in a body too big for him.  
  
She takes Blue’s hand and pulls the girl inside. There’s a cross hanging in the hallway, set between two family portraits. Calla eyes it. Their grandma hated church. Somewhere in the house, Calla can hear a dog barking and a child yelling. Tony has a son, around Blue’s age. Calla’s never met him.  
  
Neither son nor dog seem to be in any real distress, as Tony’s wife, Deirdre is hovering in the kitchen doorway at the end of the hall, summer squall on the horizon. She’s a fine-boned woman, high-necked and well-groomed. But it doesn’t take a psychic to see she’s been crying. It also doesn’t take a psychic to realize it was Tony’s idea to call a psychic in the first place.  
  
“Calla, thank you for coming,” says Deirdre, expression tight as she comes into the hallway. She holds her arms out as if for a hug, and then drops them, deciding otherwise, halfway to Calla. To be fair, Calla would not have hugged her anyway.  
  
“Anything for family,” says Calla, and surprises both herself and Deirdre that her tone is more sincere than sardonic.  
  
“It’s very generous of you,” says Deirdre.  
  
Her eyes fall on Blue then, take in the pink cowgirl boots and green tulle skirt and oversized AC/DC t-shirt. They watched Star Wars a week ago, and Blue’s been obsessed since, putting her hair up like Leia’s every morning. She looks like a five-year old girl who dressed and styled herself, which is exactly what she is.

“Is she yours?” asks Deirdre, sounding doubtful. “I didn’t realize you’d had a kid…”

Calla bares her teeth.

“She’s my niece.”

“Oh, well.” Deirdre purses her lips together. “Here. Let me –”

She reaches towards Blue’s hair.

“No!” howls Blue, clapping her hands over her lopsided Leia-buns. “I did them myself!”

Calla doesn’t even bother to try to hide her smile. Blue reacted the same way when Orla had tried to fix the buns.

Deirdre frowns, withdrawing her hands back to her sides.  
  
“Her name is Blue,” says Calla, to fill the silence. Both Deirdre and Tony seem reluctant to actually get to the why of Calla being there. Blue hugs Calla’s leg, bored and suddenly shy.  
  
Calla examines the family portraits on the hallway wall. They look like they were taken about five or six years apart, but it’s the same people in each portrait. In the first, Tony is seated, his son barely more than a wrinkled blob in his arms. His wife stands behind him, smiling serenely, and to his side, a coltish girl with her hair in neat braids.  
  
In the next picture, the blob has become a sturdy young boy, and his sister a teenager with a squashed nose and lovely eyes. Their parents beam proudly from the frame.  
  
“Poor girl has Nana’s nose,” says Calla.  
  
Deirdre lets out agasp. Tony doesn’t make a sound. When Calla turns back to look at him, his face is a small, hurting thing. Calla feels a twinge of remorse for her comment. She can almost hear Maura's cluck of admonishment.  
  
“I’m going to take Blue to meet Zachary,” says Deirdre stiffly, too polite to comment, too offended to let it pass.  
  
“No,” says Calla. “I need to see Kendra’s room. And I need Blue with me.”  
  
Deirdre’s mouth thins, but she lets Tony lead her towards the missing girl’s room.  
  
“You said Kendra’s been missing since the night before last,” says Calla. “I’m guessing you talked to the police before calling me.”  
  
“We did,” says Tony, tired-sounding. “She’s sixteen. They think she either ran away or is hiding out with a friend or boyfriend and she’ll show back up in a couple days.”  
  
“I usually did,” says Calla, with gallows humor. The unspoken “until I didn’t” remains unspoken. Though Calla, looking at Deirdre’s brittle veneer and Tony’s sagging hopelessness, wonders if this was what Nana had felt like on those unannounced excursions away from the red house with its cocoon of light.  
  
The thought drops away from her as Tony opens the door to Kendra’s room. It’s a typical teenage girl’s room – meticulously applied posters and drawings from friends, haphazardly organized art supplies, a clutter of objects and books that range from childish to quasi-adult. It’s the room of someone still becoming a fully-fledged person. The only thing remarkable about it is how clean it is, and Calla suspects that’s more Deirdre’s doing than Kendra’s.  
  
“So what do you do?” asks Deirdre. “Do you need to wave smoke around, or chant something, or…?”  
  
“Nope,” says Calla.  
  
She takes Blue’s hand and marches across the room to Kendra’s bed. She touches Kendra’s pillow. And then a chasm opens beneath her as hundreds of images kaleidoscope around her.  
  
Her eyes roll back in her head and she collapses.

***

She comes to on Kendra’s bed. She hasn’t lost that much time, she thinks. But Deirdre and Tony are looking at her with identical horrified expressions. Blue just looks intrigued.

Tony hands her a glass of water.

“What happened?” he asks.

“I blew a fuse,” says Calla. “Blue, she acts like an amplifier for my kind of thing. I think I got too much juice from her.”

Tony looks at her like he knows she’s keeping something back.  
  
Deirdre clears her throat, and says for the second time, “I’m going to take Blue to meet Zachary.”  
  
Calla doesn't stop her this time. Blue, surprisingly, leaves without a fuss, though she gives Calla a meaningful look that has entirely too much of her mother in it as she goes. Calla sneers after her.  
  
There’s a lull of silence. Calla sips at her water, frowning at the plain, soft carpeting as she tries to sort through the glimpses she received. She feels shaky and her mind is dull, but some of those glimpses definitely weren’t from Kendra’s life.  
  
“Is there any reason she would have run away?” asks Calla, finally.  
  
Tony shakes his head.  
  
“No, but…” He smiles ruefully. “I could never figure out why you did it either.”

Calla doesn’t respond to that.  
  
“So you haven’t had any arguments with her recently?”  
  
“No. Well. She’s been moodier than usual lately, so things have been snappish. But there weren’t any blow ups. I just thought, she’s a teenager. They’re moody.”  
  
“No fights with friends? No break ups?”  
  
“No,” says Tony again. He looks reflective. “She’d mostly been staying in her room. We were happy when she said she was going to spend the night at her friend’s.”  
  
“And you talked to her friend, and the friend said they never actually had plans?”  
  
Tony nodded. “You used to use that one,” he says, studying her frankly. “But Nana almost always knew when you were lying.”  
  
“Gifts from the spiritual realm,” says Calla dryly.  
  
Tony looks at her.  
  
“Have you ever talked to her?” he asks. “After she passed?”  
  
Calla shakes her head. “My gift’s trouble enough. I don’t need to be able to speak with the dead as well.”  
  
“Ah,” says Tony. He takes the now empty glass from her, and they both study the room as if Kendra might materialize from behind her dresser or step out of the closet.  
  
“You could’ve stayed with us,” says Tony, after a moment. “Nana would have wanted it. I never understood why you didn’t. I kept expecting you would turn back up in a couple days.”

Calla shakes her head. The last thing Tony and Deirdre needed at the start of their marriage was a self-immolating sixteen-year old under their roof.  
  
She’s saved from having to answer by the sound of a child shrieking. It’s not Blue’s shriek, so Calla remains sitting. But Tony stands and goes to the door.

Calla watches him go and the memory rises, unbidden, a different doorway, almost twelve years ago, not long after Nana’s funeral: Tony, his back to Calla, blocking Deirdre from view, but Deirdre’s voice rising clear and half-hysterical, “She’s not a _psychic_ , Tony. She needs _help_!”  
  
“They were playing Star Wars,” says Deirdre’s voice, exasperated, in the present. She's dragged both children back toward Kendra's room. “They got in a fight over who gets to be Han Solo.”

“I’m Han Solo,” says Blue’s voice firmly. “He’s Han Solo’s twin brother.”  
  
Calla hides a laugh and gets up. It didn't take Blue long to get into a fight, she thinks proudly. She lets Deirdre and Tony administer justice and slips into the kitchen to call Maura. She needs to ground herself. And even if Maura isn’t within a distance Calla can bridge with a simple touch, talking to her is usually at least calming.

“Is Blue behaving herself?” asks Maura, once the pleasantries – which are brief; Calla is rarely pleasant – have been dispensed.

“No,” says Calla, sticking her tongue out at Blue as the girl appears in the kitchen, looking haughty and above reproach. “She’s already made my cousin’s kid cry twice.”

“She has not!” says Maura, as Blue shrieks, composure gone, “Only _once_!”

“She’s a terror,” says Calla.

Maura laughs, note of pride to it.

“That’s my girl.” Her tone takes a turn for the serious. “How are you doing?”

Calla considers her responses. Maura will take her to task if she’s glib.

She ran away at sixteen. She kept running until she met Maura Sargent. And the truth of it all is – Maura Sargent saved her life. Here was someone who could keep Calla from feeling like she no longer had any real estate inside her own brain.

“I’ve had better days. But I’ve had a hell of a lot worse, too.”

“I should have come with you,” says Maura.

“And leave Persephone to starve to death?” Calla clucks.

Maura laughs gently. “She told me this morning you were in for a shock today. She wants to know what it was.”

Calla sighs and lowers her voice. Deirdre and Tony are both with their son in the living room, but she’d still rather not be overhead.

“Their girl is psychic,” she says.

Maura’s quiet for a moment.

“Do you think that has anything to do with her being missing?”

“If I knew that yet, I wouldn’t be talking to you on the phone, would I?”

“There’s the Calla I know and love,” says Maura.

Calla rolls her eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” says Maura. “And I’m not saying that because I’m psychic. I’m saying that because I know you.”

“Yes. You’re very impressive.”

“Damn right. Now are you going to tell me what happened?”

“I told you what happened.”  
  
“Calla.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m your brat, Maura Sargent.”

“Don’t act like my brat then.”

Calla sighs and grimaces at the phone. Damn Maura Sargent and damn her child.

“She’s like me. I touched her pillow and I didn’t just get _her_ , I got a bunch of other people as well, a bunch of people she had bits of. And since Blue was holding my hand that was a lot of people.”

“Are you all right?” asks Maura.

“I’m great. Your demon spawn wants to talk to you.”

Blue to this point has displayed no interest in talking to Maura. But when Calla carries the phone over to Blue, Blue snatches it from her anyway.

“First of _all_ ,” says Blue into the phone, sternly, “Calla is _lying_! Secondly, Maura! Calla fainted!”

Calla winces. She can hear Maura’s tinny cry of “Calla did _what_?” and she walks out of the kitchen rather than get involved in a grilling. Kendra’s door is open at the end of the hallway. Without Blue amplifying this time, chances are she can touch something of Kendra’s and not black out.

She stands in the doorway, hands on her hips, studying her options.

There are two stuffed animals on the dresser. One’s a bunny with an ear that was clearly torn off at one point and reattached, its pink fur is faded and patchy from too many washes. The other is a small, cheap-looking stuffed bear that’s clutching a red heart, the kind that comes with boxes of chocolates around Valentine’s Day. It looks new, the fabric on the heart still shiny.  
  
They’re the only stuffed animals visible in the room, the mark of a girl trying to be grown up before her time.

Calla picks the stuffed bear up.

***

“Hello?” says the young man at the door, thirty minutes later and in a suburb in Maryland. He’s tall and gangly, not yet filled into his form but past the age of pimply. Calla pegs him for twenty. Too old for Kendra, she thinks. No wonder they hid it.

“I’m Kendra’s aunt,” says Calla. She gestures behind her to the street. “And that’s her parents and little brother in the car. You tell her she needs to come home now.”

The boy draws himself up to his full height, an impressive foot above Calla’s.

“I don’t know what you’re – ”

Calla grabs his wrist and then lets go, satisfied. He’s not a bad kid. Just a stupid one. Which is true of most kids.

“Where does your sister live, Marcus Alexander Kirkland?” she says. Blue snickers next to her.

Marcus’s eyes widen and he nearly lands on his ass trying to get away from her.

“How did you?” he starts to babble. Calla holds a hand up and follows him into the hallway, Blue sticking to the protective aura of her skirt.

“I asked you a question first,” she says. She looks hard at him.

He only lasts a second before Calla has his sister’s name, telephone number, and address written on a post-it. She smiles and takes Blue’s hand and turns to go.

“I didn’t do anything to her, I swear,” says Marcus, visibly gulping. “She told me she needed help.”

Calla doesn’t even look at him. She already knows.

***

The first time Calla could tell something about a person just by touching them, she was fourteen. It was the cashier at 7-11. Their hands had touched briefly and Calla had compulsively blurted out, “I’m sorry about your dog.” The cashier had looked at her with a mixture of wonder and fear, and Calla avoided that 7-11 ever since.  
  
The first time she could tell something about a person just by touching something they owned, she was fourteen and a half. She borrowed a pen from Cindy Katz in English and then immediately dropped it, as it had come with the knowledge Cindy was failing Geometry and incredibly stressed about her upcoming test next period.  
  
Being a psychic had slammed into her like an oncoming train, but at least Nana had been there to pull her off the tracks for a little while. Kendra hasn’t had anyone.  
  
Calla had thought, for a while, her talent might make her especially suited to investigating crimes. She had pictured herself, called in to help crack difficult murders. She would touch the body and bring voice and justice to the dead.  
  
But when she’d found Nana’s body one February Wednesday after school and touched it, all she felt was that it was cold.  
  
***  
  
“This is the address,” says Tony, pulling into a parking spot outside a nondescript block of apartments. He unbuckles his seatbelt and Deirdre, in the back with the children, does the same.  
  
“I’m going to go up alone,” says Calla firmly, and she leaves the car before she can hear arguments. She’s not followed; her stunt with Marcus was apparently impressive enough to grant her some leeway.  
  
It’s a second’s work to learn the security code to the apartment building, and another thirty seconds to get up the stairs to apartment 206.  
  
Maya Kirkland’s face visibly sags with relief when she opens the door and Calla announces who she is.

“I’m a nurse,” she says, as she lets Calla in, eager to explain herself. “Marcus showed up with his girlfriend and said she was freaking out and she needed help. Asked if I had anything she could take to calm down.”

“You didn’t take her to the hospital?” asks Calla.

Maya goes very still. She looks warily at the door she’s standing in front of. Her voice goes low.

“She’s not sick. But there’s something that’s not natural about her either. She knows things she shouldn’t know.”  
  
“It runs in the family,” says Calla.  
  
Maya gives her a wary look and retreats a few steps.  
  
“I’ll be in the kitchen,” she says.  
  
Calla nods and opens the door. It’s a small bedroom. She sees a pair of thin shoulders and a bowed head. Kendra is lying on a bed on her side, facing the wall. She crosses the room and sits down next to Kendra. The bed shifts with her weight.

“You shouldn’t blackmail people who are trying to help you,” says Calla.

“Who are you?” croaks Kendra without looking at her.

“I’m Calla. I grew up with your dad.”

Kendra sits up and looks at Calla. Her eyes are pink and darkbagged. She’s been crying. But she looks bright with excitement this moment, an almost feral quality to it.

“You’re the one, you’re the one. Mom says.”

Calla barks a laugh. “Did she use the words fraud or crazy? Or both?”

“She says you think you’re a psychic,” says Kendra. Her voice is very soft.

Calla nods. “It runs in the women, usually. Nana Grant – your great-grandmother – she had a touch of it, too. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Kendra stares at Calla like the last puppy left in the crate.  
  
“I thought I was going crazy,” she says, and it all comes out in a rush. “All of the sudden, I knew things I shouldn’t have been able to know. Like, I hugged one of my friends and I realized her parents were getting a divorce and she’d been crying about it. And it wasn’t just big stuff. I felt like I was, I felt like I wasn’t me anymore. I didn’t know who I was. And all these memories – they weren’t my memories. I was remembering things that never happened to me. And it hurts. My head hurts all the time. Everyone is so – they’re so _much._ ”

“I know, baby,” says Calla.  
  
Kendra takes a deep breath and keeps talking, the words rattling out of her. “Marcus, my, my boyfriend.” She blushes, and adds as a hurried sidenote, nothing Calla didn’t already find out, “We met at the mall. He was worried about me. He said I should come over and he’d give me a massage. And I did, and he did, and we.” She flushes darker. “We, you know. Except then it was like I wasn’t me _at all_. I think I had a breakdown.”  
  
Calla nods sympathetically. The first time she’d had sex, she’d ending up shoving Ty Chisolm off her halfway through so she could roll to the edge of the bed and vomit. The second time hadn’t gone much better. It was a lot of exposure to one person, an overload to have all their vulnerabilities crash through you.  
  
She doesn’t touch Kendra. She can’t without making it worse.  
  
Instead, she says, “I ran away a lot when I was around your age. Mainly because I was an angry brat and I thought your dad and my grandma were overprotective and boring. But then Nana died, and I didn’t have anyone who understood what I was going through. Tony believed me, but couldn’t help me, and your mother’s always been skeptical. I was scared of how different I was. I wanted to find people like me. Or find people who could help me. Or just find a way to make the world shut up. So I ran away, for good. I was scared, and I thought I was alone.”  
  
It's a lot of words at once from her. She's not used to talking so much. But Kendra needs to hear it. She needs to know she's not alone. Even now, Calla can remember what sixteen had felt like, like being in a permanent freefall, like her own self was a force of nature beyond her control.  
  
Kendra listens quietly but with every sign of attentiveness.  
  
“You don’t seem crazy,” she says tentatively, once she realizes Calla’s done talking. “Did you figure things out?”  
  
“Oh, I’m plenty crazy.” Calla flashes her teeth. “But yeah, I mostly figured things out.”  
  
Kendra nods, her face flickers hopeful and then shuts back down to totally morose.  
  
“Are my parents totally pissed?” she asks with a little girl’s fear.  
  
“They’re worried,” says Calla. “But they’ll probably be pissed later.”  
  
She remembers the catch in Tony’s voice when Maura had bullied her into finally calling him, three years after she’d run away, to tell him she was alive, she was safe, she was mostly happy. She hadn’t been expecting to hear him break down and cry on the other end of the line.  
  
It’s an irony of her power, thinks Calla, that the more knowledge it gave her of other people, the more she drew in on herself, and the less she actually knew.  
  
Kendra buries her face in her hands.  
  
“What am I going to do?” she moans.  
  
“You’re going to get up,” says Calla. “Your family’s waiting. We’re going to have to buy you some gloves. And I’m going to visit you and teach you how to keep your powers in check so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.”  
  
She stands up and looks at Kendra expectantly.  
  
Kendra looks up. She nods, swallows hard, and wobbles to her feet. They walk back to their family together.  
  
End.

 

 


End file.
